Perhaps this planet does somewhere else contain a thing like the
Colorado River--but that is no matter; we at any rate in our continent
possess one of nature's very vastest works. After The River and its
tributaries have done with all sight of the upper world, have left
behind the bordering plains and streamed through the various gashes
which their floods have sliced in the mountains that once stopped
their way, then the culminating wonder begins. The River has been
flowing through the loneliest part which remains to us of that large
space once denominated "The Great American Desert" by the vague maps
in our old geographies. It has passed through regions of emptiness
still as wild as they were before Columbus came; where not only no man
lives now nor any mark is found of those forgotten men of the cliffs,
but the very surface of the earth itself looks monstrous and extinct.
Upon one such region in particular the author of these pages dwells,
when he climbs up out of the gulf in whose bottom he has left his boat
by the River, to look out upon a world of round gray humps and hollows
which seem as if it were made of the backs of huge elephants. Through
such a country as this, scarcely belonging to our era any more than
the mammoth or the pterodactyl, scarcely belonging to time at all,
does the Colorado approach and enter its culminating marvel. Then, for
283 miles it inhabits a nether world of its own. The few that have
ventured through these places and lived are a handful to those who
went in and were never seen again. The white bones of some have been
found on the shores; but most were drowned; and in this water no
bodies ever rise, because the thick sand that its torrent churns along
clogs and sinks them.

This place exerts a magnetic spell. The sky is there above it, but not
of it. Its being is apart; its climate; its light; its own. The beams
of the sun come into it like visitors. Its own winds blow through it,
not those of outside, where we live. The River streams down its
mysterious reaches, hurrying ceaselessly; sometimes a smooth sliding
lap, sometimes a falling, broken wilderness of billows and whirlpools.
Above stand its walls, rising through space upon space of silence.
They glow, they gloom, they shine. Bend after bend they reveal
themselves, endlessly new in endlessly changing veils of colour. A
swimming and jewelled blue predominates, as of sapphires being melted
and spun into skeins of shifting cobweb.